


The Truth Is We All Live by Leaving Behind

by Zabbers



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Children, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-14
Updated: 2013-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-14 22:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/842137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character study of Sherlock and Mycroft's relationship, with some clues as to why Sherlock might consider Mycroft his archenemy, and the most dangerous man one has ever met. Many thanks to wicked_socks for a helpful betaing during a busy time of a fic I was feeling very uncertain about for a long time!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Truth Is We All Live by Leaving Behind

_Mycroft_

 

Some things are boundary objects; some things are neither one thing, nor another, but both; some things remain in the moment of becoming, caught like a moth between light and dark. Like the dusk.

You can tell because even when they’re still, they aren’t really there. _If_ they are ever still. If you dare to reach out and arrest the humming spin, long enough to see.

Some things are given to you like this, raw and otherworldly and constantly becoming. And although they cannot stop moving, they also cannot escape, cannot struggle through the transformation from one thing to another, fight as they will against what transfixes them there; while around them, you change, the world changes, year after year, dusk into night into dawn into day into dusk again.

They think, quite rightly, that you are the pin that pierces them.

Sherlock is this moth caught in the light of his own intellect, beating wild, gossamer, rice-paper wings against the things that hold him in place, changeling child, falling angel desperate not to be a rising ape. Yearning to plunge headlong, singing joy and defiance, into the flame.

But would he rise from his own ashes, or would he merely burn himself down?

Sometimes, Mycroft tries to imagine his young brother burning, but all he can see is an impassive figure, untouched even by the conflagration. The fire burns all around him: life, lives, living--he is trapped, frozen, so pale he might never have breathed at all, a porcelain figure with hollow glass eyes staring out at the world as though he wasn’t in it.

Sherlock sees everything, through those anemic eyes, and forgets nothing. He’s paralysed by the details of existence, like sharp-edged textures under his fingers, catching at his skin, his attention, his mind as he brushes over them.

In a way, Mycroft understands what it is like to be this boy, to have the world, so demanding, batter at him always. In a way, tempered by experience, Mycroft is the same. They are cut from the same cloth, after all. Same mother, same father, same restless mind refusing to yield. It could be something else, of course, like duty or love or impatience, but he thinks this is why, when he finds Sherlock struggling like a panicked creature in their mother’s embrace, Mycroft decides to help him.

Sherlock’s expression shifts from wide-eyed absence to annoyed scowl in the instant Mycroft draws him away from Mummy, the moment he feels he has regained some control of the situation. She wants to save him, she does, but she doesn’t know how, knows only holding and loving and caressing, as mothers do. She doesn’t understand what Sherlock needs, and couldn’t give it to him if she did.

Mycroft does.

“Sherlock,” he says--he knows what his brother’s been doing, to drive their mother to this; how he frightens her when he frightens himself, when living and becoming and the sheer intensity of being Sherlock Holmes overwhelm him. “Sherlock. Why do you kick and shout?”

He doesn’t need to ask, because he knows, but Sherlock needs to learn, and to learn he must think.

“I don’t know, _Mycroft_.” The answer is biting, petulant. “Because that’s what I do.”

Patience is something Mycroft has been cultivating of late. He’s found it useful, as he’s matured, knows it will always serve him well. “Why did you kick and shout _this_ time?”

Sherlock’s eyes dart away.

“Because of the mistakes,” he admits at last.

“Mistakes?”

“The mistakes, the errors! In the broadcast this evening. It was full, _full_ of them. Professionals, all, giving a nationally broadcast concert, and there were thirty mistakes in the first movement alone. And Mummy was trying to talk to me, and Mrs. Noakes came in with the weekly accounts, and there was a man pacing in the drive with a car idling, someone we don’t know, and Mummy opened the window, and I was cold, and the tempo was all wrong, and they were raising their voices and Mrs. Noakes slammed the door, and the conductor was an idiot, and I couldn’t go and _fix_ it! I couldn’t fix it, Mycroft!”

By the end of his rant--or litany--Sherlock looks like he’s ready to bolt, or vomit, or both. (He used to do this, when he was younger, throw up on Mycroft’s shoes and run away and hide, and they wouldn’t find him for hours; once, days.) Mycroft holds the delicate wrists in his far larger hands, lightly but firmly, neither close nor distant, refusing to let him go.

“Listen to me. No, listen. To think is not to give equal weight to everything. You’re caught up in the details, because you have the gift of observation, but you must learn to find the patterns in the noise. You notice everything. Now you must cultivate another skill. Look for causes as well as effects. Find sense out of nonsense.”

Sherlock notices everything, and forgets nothing, and it is making him mad. Mycroft has seen the way it whites out his mind, the way he stares, blank and pallid, in the moments before he has a tantrum, and he knows his brother doesn’t want to be like this, doesn’t want to lose himself time and again in the almost contiguous detail that assaults him. He doesn’t want to be caught like a specimen, a freak, forever under glass.

He’s so much better than that, so much cleverer, if only he could be taught. Perhaps an example.

Mycroft guides them to a pair of seats so that they can be on the same level. “Take this evening, for instance. Think through everything you’ve told me. Which of those details went together? What happened, that could have caused them? There is a story there you have not deduced.”

Sherlock’s expression is aggressively skeptical at first--thinking, no doubt, that there could be no story, for ordinary people are random and stupid and dull--but then he blinks rapidly, something new lighting up his features. Mycroft can see the realisation spark in that over-spinning brain, and spread, and cool its heat by giving it more fuel.

He might even describe what he sees in the boy as wonder, if he were given to overstatement, and he feels it begin in himself as well, because he knows, _knows_ that this is going to work. This is transformation, at last. This is metamorphosis.

Mycroft holds his breath, waiting for the follow-through. Sherlock pulls his feet onto the chair, draws his knees up: suddenly all that energy, previously manifest only in the urge to run, the need to escape, has a new focus. Thinking. Concentrating. Sorting the things he needs from those he doesn’t, paring down the data and making the connections. And then:

“Mrs. Noakes has quit!” he crows triumphantly.

“Yes.”

“To run away with a man not her husband!”

“Exactly.”

“I shan’t have to clean my room after all!”

“Well...”

Sherlock shoots him an accusing look. He knows _exactly_ what has just happened, and he knows that for the moment at least Mycroft is going to be indulgent.

“There is that rather suspect mug on your desk. The one with the tea leaves turning white and... _fluffy_ inside?” Mycroft gives a fastidious shudder.

“It’s an experiment.” Sherlock looks positively impish now, a delighted little devil with a shock of curly, black hair and the grin of a boy very pleased with himself. This is the thing about Sherlock Holmes. Unchangeable as he is, he’s mercurial. At any given time, he’s neither one thing nor another. Mycroft, who knows him better than anybody (as well as anybody), can follow his trajectory, can predict the unpredictable spin, could pluck it out of its path, though he won’t. Only nudge and coax it into place.

Gently does it. So much more can be accomplished with a murmur than a shout.

Mycroft untucks the day’s newspaper from under his arm and hands it to Sherlock. “See what else you can deduce.” There’s always something in the news, something the police or the Government or the reporters have missed. A story behind the story, there for the telling if you look carefully.

Give Sherlock the tools, and he’ll work it all out eventually. Mycroft can see it already, what he will become (a deterministic genius working backwards). The pieces have always been there; he’s only rearranging them to reveal the picture. In this way, they are alike, these brothers: it is inescapable. They are bound together, both captured by the same half-light, same intersection that sets them apart, neither one thing nor another.

They have arrived at the boundary together.

The world is all detail, and ordinary people travel through it with thoughtless ease, blind to half the colours and most of the textures. Sherlock and Mycroft, they see reality as it is complete, and must concoct fictions to make sense of it, Mycroft by putting it in order, Sherlock, at once the more distilled and less refined, by learning to forget the things that don’t matter.

Only in this way can they move out of the periphery and into the changing world. Mycroft knows his destiny is to stand still at the very centre of it and direct the traffic. Sherlock will run, as fast as he can, forever chasing it, forever chasing life. It isn’t an easy way to be, but it’s exhilarating, it’s like balancing indefinitely on the cusp of dawn as the Earth spins beneath your feet. And it’s the best that they can do.

 

_Sherlock_

 

Mycroft lives in shadows; he always has. Sherlock remembers, as he remembers all the important things, the silhouette of his brother, like a ghost, forever just beyond his peripheral vision. Once, when he was a child, he slipped, clambering too eagerly up a ladder he wasn’t meant to climb, and thought that he would fall, but Mycroft was there, and caught him.

Mycroft thinks this is the way to live, to lurk in the background and stop you doing the things that will hurt you. He thinks this is how the world should be, blindly oblivious to the hand of Mycroft Holmes coming out of shadows, waiting to catch you.

Always watching.

Sherlock has never been alone. Which is fine--he doesn’t need to be invisible to go on doing what he does, doesn’t feel compelled to hide or behave out of shame that someone sees. He’s better than that. A lifetime’s scrutiny has only rendered him immune to his brother’s influence.

Besides, Sherlock has only one occupation these days, and that is to avoid being bored. To avoid the mundane details that clutter one’s mind when there is nothing of consequence to occupy it. Even in a city like London there is remarkably little, because ordinary people are so unimaginative, and every story is one that he has read before in the minutiae of their appearances.

He rides for hour after sordid hour on the Underground, discreetly high, watching them come and go and come and go, willing that one of them, even just one of them, will surprise him. With something in his system, blacking out parts of his mind, he can almost think, almost bear the reduced onslaught of banality. He ignores the camera that never stops filming him.

After midnight, when service ends, he goes back to his flat, pours himself a drink, and walks into the shower. Some nights, as hot as he can make it, hot enough to turn his skin pink and his breath short and his chest tight. Some nights, frigid as the snowy air outside, so that he emerges shivering and blind. The water falling relentlessly on the surface of his body is like a dream of sensation, distanced and alien and safe.

In this way, Sherlock is separate from it all, as he is meant to be. As he longs to be.

As Mycroft is. Mycroft is a master of separateness, a virtuoso of detachment, playing the world from its hidden centre. He plays everybody from behind the screen, and Sherlock isn’t sure that he knows how not to manipulate, distort, control. But then, that’s true of either brother; Sherlock is clear on that much.

So that’s all right as well.

What’s not all right is when two large men in less than subtle suits break into his escapist reverie and walk him forcibly off the train, impervious to his enthusiastic objections. They’re silent as they escort him into the waiting car, silent throughout the drive (Sherlock knowing at each moment exactly where they are and exactly where they’re going), silent as they escort him into the bland building that houses Mycroft’s office.

It’s a spare space, a utilitarian closet that suits Mycroft only in his pragmatism and not at all in his appreciation for a comfortable lifestyle. He’s due for an upgrade, really.

“No,” Sherlock says firmly as soon as he has thought this. The single syllable breaks the silence brought in from outside: Sherlock’s obstinate petulance, Mycroft’s disappointed inspection of him.

“No?” In Mycroft’s tones, the word is suddenly no longer blunt and final, but loses its nerve, wavers, becomes sweet and pliant. It warbles. It lingers. It rises and dissolves into the air, full of possibility.

Sherlock longs for another hit, something to make the details of Mycroft’s desk and his nominal life less vivid. How he’s lonely. How all the conveniences of London don’t stop him missing home. How he feels stifled in this windowless box. Sherlock doesn’t want to know, but he can’t help it, he notices everything.

And yet, in spite of this, he refuses to get involved. They’re tangled up enough as it is, what with Mycroft like his shadow. If he turns around to help him, they’ll be locked together forever, and Sherlock craves escape. “Whatever it is you want me to do, I won’t do it.”

“But it’s nothing,” Mycroft objects. “It isn’t for me. I want you to do it for yourself. I’m worried about you.”

Sherlock looks away impatiently. He won’t be allowed to leave until Mycroft has completed his pitch.

“You enjoy investigating. It’s good for your brain, keeps it occupied and out of trouble. Keeps it organised. I’ve come across something of a mystery, and I think it would do you good to try to puzzle it out.”

On principle, Sherlock wouldn’t listen, but Mycroft pulls a thin folder from the filing cabinet and places it on his desk, letting it fall open as he slides it across the grainy wood. At a glance, Sherlock sees what is the problem, and in the space of a breath, almost involuntarily, he reaches out to flip the pages over, to gather all the data.

It’s instinct, it’s how he thinks. And Mycroft, who knows how, has arranged the documents so as to best snag Sherlock’s attention. So as to capture him.

“This woman, the one who doesn’t have an alibi; of what is she accused?”

“That’s classified, you know that.”

As though the rest of it isn’t. As though just being in this office doesn’t already mean that Mycroft is in breach of the Official Secrets Act, given everything Sherlock can see. What makes one secret less secret than another? What makes one betrayal more forgiveable? It’s all gradations, with Mycroft. Textures going from smooth to piercingly jagged, brightness and hue through all their intensities, goodness to necessity to necessary evil. But where for Mycroft it is a continuum, all of it in a sense the same, Sherlock sees an infinite number of discrete differences, particles instead of waves. All casting shadows.

Sherlock doesn’t like shadows. Shadows are difficult to read. Shadows fool the eyes.

Shadows...

Like the ones in the photograph.

“This can’t have been taken at the time indicated.” Sherlock extracts a glossy print from a stack of half a dozen.

“Why not?”

“Look at this building in the corner. At that camera angle, in that spot on the Embankment, it should have cast a shadow over half the picture.”

“Perhaps it was overcast.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes and gestures impatiently at Mycroft for use of his computer. It’s possible, of course, that it _had_ been overcast, but less likely that the weather accounted for the incongruency between the photograph and the time it had purportedly been taken.

The search supports his deduction. It was sunny that day, bright and hot.

Mycroft smiles, and there is something discomfitingly satisfied about the smile that causes Sherlock to wonder, all the way home, what he’s done.

Days later, it’s all over the news. She’d been a junior minister, favoured for a position in the cabinet that hadn’t yet been vacant the night Mycroft had had Sherlock brought in. No longer favoured, though; she’d been exposed in a personal scandal, implicated by a series of photographs that placed her where she oughtn’t have been; servicing, as one paper smugly reports, her lover and not her constituency.

The woman who does enter the cabinet serves no one, it seems, but Sherlock knows better. He can see the evidence of her master in the policies that go through, the missiles that are fired, the way Mycroft’s new office suits him perfectly.

Sherlock wonders how many people die because he could not resist looking at a photograph. How many lives have been destroyed because of the inexorable crushing force of his mind. How much harm he has done, under his brother’s tutelage.

And he has never been so angry, nor so determined.

Over the next week, he hacks into the Met’s server, accesses and solves seventeen of their cold cases and two active inquiries, and sends them all to a DI chosen at random, and when the man, a Lestrade, is creative enough to leave a message for him asking for further help, Sherlock is only too eager to present himself at New Scotland Yard.

Consulting Detective. Cleverer than your police detective, more observant, more dedicated. Above all more driven, because there is a balance of lives against him, which he must offset.

And if the work turns out to be _interesting_ , and a better drug than any he can get through needle or lungs, well, that’s just extra.

As for Mycroft: Sherlock watches him build his shadow empire, brick by brick from the ruin of other people’s lives, and he thinks, sometimes, that they have outgrown one another. Because the truth is, we all live by leaving behind. The women with their husbands and their lovers. The murderers, the victims. Brothers on either side of a hidden battle.

Mycroft has been teaching him that much, all along. To think, he must forget. To see, he must overlook. Having stepped out of Mycroft’s shadows, Sherlock can see them clearly, can see the lines of skirmish, and through them he can see the truth. He can see the truth of his life.

To live, he must leave behind.


End file.
